AGDQ 2018, the first Games Done Quick speedrunning-for-charity event of the year, has been running this week, and Umihara Kawase is one of the many games making an appearance. Umihara Kawase last appeared at a GDQ event at AGDQ 2015 (discussion thread and video link can be found here), when speedrunner bjw performed the shortest route. This time, bjw will play through the longest route.

As of the time of this post, Umihara is scheduled for January 11, 18:38 UTC -- about eight hours from the time of this post. I'm basically repeating stuff from the 2015 thread here, but keep an eye on the schedule (which will convert the times according to your time zone) if you're interested; the scheduled starting time will vary as other game playthroughs take more or less time than expected. I won't be able to watch it live, unfortunately, but it should be interesting!

It's remarkable that such an obscure game has had two showings at GDQ now. Spelunky is also up for a second showing, and they've finally accepted a proper Bloodborne run, so I'm pretty happy with this year's selection.

(Edit: more of a let's play, but still great to see it in front of ~100k people!)

BJW's AGDQ 2015 run was good. I liked the commentary. This one will be fun to watch as well. Glad to see Umihara's getting more mainstream attention. We might even see Umihara in an English Nintendo Direct!

I meant no disrespect to BJW, it's only that there are people here (and certainly in the Umihara Kawase community in Japan) who would nail that route a lot more tightly. Saying that, I'd imagine those extremely tightly optimised IL strats don't translate well into safe marathon strats, so who knows, maybe not.

Anyway, I imagine this route was a lot more engaging for people who don't know the game than the fastest route that was played at GDQ previously, which is over within a few minutes. With any luck a few more Westerners will pick up the game and it'll start a bit more of the recognition it deserves over here. Such a shame it was never released outside of Japan - it would have been a word-of-mouth kind of game, a slow burner, and probably wouldn't have shifted big numbers but it'd be more widely recognised as a cult classic.